‘Comedy of Errors’
By BILL VARBLE and RICHARD MOESCHL

Mail Tribune, OR
June 3 2005

These days “The Comedy of Errors” gets done every which way but
straight. It’s been done as Edwardian farce, as Mardi Gras, as
something out of the Arabian Nights.

Shakespeare’s mistaken identity farce about two sets of twins was
presented last year by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as a ’50s Las
Vegas piece. Think Frank and Dino and the Rat Pack.

So what will Rogue Community College do with it? Would you believe
rubber chickens and belly dancers?

They’ll be there when RCC presents the play Friday through Monday,
June 3 through June 6, at The Warehouse at the corner of Ninth and
Bartlett streets in downtown Medford.

Performances will be available at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, at 2
p.m. Sunday and at 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

But the lines will be authentic “Comedy.”

“We’ve taken liberties with the play,” RCC’s Ron Danko says, “but
not with the language.”

The plot involves twin brothers who were separated as children, and
the brothers’ twin servants, who were, ahem, separated in the same
shipwreck (it’s all so airy that audiences usually suspend disbelief
willingly).

When Antipholus of Syracuse and his Dromio visit Ephesus, they do
not know that Antipholus of Ephesus and his Dromio live there. Nor
do they know that an execution is looming in which they have a role
to play. Let the confusion begin.

“The Comedy of Errors” is one of the earliest Shakespeare plays. It
is frothy but often highly entertaining.

Ephesus is in present-day Turkey, so the belly-dancing theme is not
that much of a stretch.

About those belly dancers.

“Ron called me on a Friday and said that there was belly dancing at
the brew pub,” says RCC’s John Cole, who teaches theater arts.

“When I saw them I said, ‘I have to have this in the play.’ We
have Suzanne Veach as choreographer. She is from the dance troupe
Shalomar. And we had a student who was studying belly dancing.”

Cole sees “Comedy” in part as “kind of an exercise in xenophobia” in
that Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse leap to the wrong conclusions
to explain the weird goings-on in a foreign port.

“They show up in an unusual place, and they freak out when they make
the assumption that everything around them is caused by sorcerers
and wizards,” Cole says.

Some productions cast two actors as the Antipholi and two as the
Dromios. Others (including the OSF in 2004) cast a single actor as
each set of twins, although this is challenging to stage.

This production takes both approaches. Matthew Adam Huffman plays
the Antipholi, but there are two Dromios. Scott Burditt is Dromio of
Syracuse. Aaron Findley is Dromio of Ephesus.

Twenty-four actors are cast. Ken Edwards is Solinus, and Mark Barsekian
is Egeon. Adriana is played by Krystal Brewer, and Luciana by MiLisa
Childers.

Peter Spring adds musical accompaniment.

“This might be the most talented cast we’ve assembled,” Danko says.
“They’re full of life.”

Cole says a student production of Shakespeare takes excruciating
discipline and has a steep learning curve.

The cast includes a disabled vet and an actor who’s legally blind.

Barsekian’s Armenian and Greek ancestors hail from the part of the
world where the play takes place. In addition to Egeon, he plays
Doctor Pinch and Luce, a maid. The play is Barsekian’s senior capstone
project at RCC.

“He is the funniest guy I’ve seen in a long time,” Danko says.

Cole says he expects as many as five students in the production to
go on to study theater.

He says the production got a huge boost when he visited a painting
class at RCC, and two women, Gigi Sharrow and Janet Eshoo, both
non-traditional students, said they wanted to help out. Sharrow and
Eshoo wound up making all the play’s hats and dyeing the costumes.
They built the belly-dance costumes from scratch and made others.

Jeanne Schraub and Ralph Henderson from the construction technology
department at RCC provided platforms for the stage.

In the past the warehouse space has been made into a proscenium
theater for RCC’s production of “Working,” into avenue seating for
“Twelfth Night” and even into a sort of three-quarter thrust stage for
“Spoon River.”

What next?

Cole describes its new incarnation as “a sort of
three-quartersavenuethrustenium.”

Like he says, “What could go wrong?”

“The Comedy of Errors” runs a little over two hours with an
intermission.